$9 Million Pulp-Fiction Illustration Collection Donated To NBMAA

Robert Lesser Adds $1.3 Million To Care For 200 Artworks

May 08, 2013|By SUSAN DUNNE, sdunne@courant.com, The Hartford Courant

The days of pulp fiction are long past, but the bold artwork that graced the covers of work by struggling writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ray Bradbuy has found a home at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

The museum has been given a 200-piece collection of pulp-fiction illustrations valued at about $9 million. It is the most valuable gift in the museum's 76-year history and makes NBMAA the world's largest repository of pulp-fiction art, an exclusively American art form.

The illustrations, which Robert Lesser of New York City has been collecting since 1972, have been on the premises of NBMAA since last year. Lesser signed the deed of gift on April 30. In addition to the donation of the artworks, Lesser donated $1.3 million in an operating fund to finance their upkeep.

The artworks are original oil paintings created in the '20s, '30s and '40s to be reproduced on covers of 10-cent and 25-cent publications that contained sensationalized, tawdry stories, many with sex and violence, whose graphic nature often led to raids on publishing houses by police or vice-suppression activists.

Despite — or, more correctly, because of — its sleazy content, pulp fiction was enormously popular.

Today those three decades are considered the golden age of pulp fiction. Some of the stories were written by now-legendary writers Tennessee Williams, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Erle Stanley Gardner, Hammett, Chandler and Bradbury.

Pulp-fiction artists, driven to professional desperation by lack of work, especially during the Depression, often were embarrassed about making their livings creating lurid images that would grace the covers of risqué publications, NBMAA Director Doug Hyland says.

"The covers had to be so sensational that, during the Depression, you'd rather spend your 25 cents to buy the novel than to buy lunch," Hyland says. "It was starvation or stimulation."

As a result of this disrespect, even by the artists and their editors and publishers, "the publishing houses literally put them on the curb or threw them into the dustbin, so there are not that many surviving examples," Hyland says.

The illustrations in the NBMAA's gift graced the covers of pulps such as Tarzan stories, installments of "The Shadow" series, "Doc Savage" episodes, mystery, cowboy, wartime and science-fiction stories. Some of the stories had a bit of world-history interest, such as battle dramas set during World War I and World War II.

"My favorite one is about a mad scientist who in 1920 freeze-dries a Yale student, and in 2020 he is thawed out and reconstituted," Hyland says.

Hyland says he has been "courting" Lesser for seven or eight years to donate the collection. Until Lesser donated his works, NBMAA had no pulp fiction in its illustration holdings.

Eric Fowler, collections manager for the Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators in New York, calls the NBMAA's acquisition "a real coup. ... Frankly, we were disappointed that we weren't considered." Fowler says his Manhattan museum has, in its 2,000-piece collection of illustrations, only two pulp-fiction items.

Fowler says only about 550 pulp-fiction images are known to still exist; Lesser, the donor, would put that number at 800, "because I'm an optimist, and I think more are out there. ... Only about 400 of those are worth looking at," and his collection includes only high-quality examples.

Lesser, interviewed by phone from his Manhattan apartment on Wednesday, tells how he began collecting pulp art. And it sounds a bit like a pulp-fiction story itself.

"In 1972, I had no idea pulp art even existed. I got a call from a dealer in Philadelphia who had a 'Shadow' painting. There was a blizzard going on then. People were skiing on Madison Avenue. The young lady in bed with me had a bottle of vodka and we both thought the world was coming to an end. But I had a feeling in my bones. I had to go to Philadelphia," he says. "She says 'You're insane, there's a blizzard going on. If you leave I won't be here when you get back.' But I took a train and went there.

"I saw this incredible oil painting on canvas of 'The Shadow.' ... It was a one-of-a-kind oil painting done on canvas, not a mass-produced collectible. It was absolutely beautiful."

For years, he was one of the only people in the country who collected pulp art. Other art collectors told him the works were vulgar. "I was shunned. Nobody collected it. It was looked upon as, well, I don't use four-letter words," he says. "At [his alma mater] the University of Chicago, they would deride me, 'How can you collect this stuff, it's horrible.'"

Still, despite their low-rent origins, he was fascinated by the paintings' quality, their one-of-a-kind originality and the fact that so many of them were destroyed after publication or decades later.

"The artists couldn't take them home and you couldn't give it away because nobody's mother, sister, daughter or wife would allow them in the house," Lesser says.